A Soulful Journey

What, or as he preferred to say, who was a human being?   How shall we understand ourselves?   Heschel was profoundly shocked in pre-Nazi Germany when he found biology textbooks that defined a human being as a collection of iron and phosphorous and other chemicals that were worth so and so many dollars on the market.   He felt that the road to Nazism began in those books, that one could draw a straight line between teachings like that and what the Nazis ended up doing to human beings.   People were dehumanized first in theory and then in fact, first in the classroom and then on the streets.   If man is only this, why revere him, why not use him, why not abuse him?   -Rabbi Jack Reimer The moment anyone becomes “little less than Divine” in our world any atrocity is possible.

On Kristallnacht Goebbels went out to view the wreckage of Jewish synagogues.   Goebbels, standing calmly on the street, watched the proceedings. Suddenly, a taxi driver dashed up to him and tapped Goebbels on the shoulder and said, “You’d better get out before they get you.” Defiant, Goebbels said, "Don’t you know who I am? I am Josef Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda.” The Jew, unmoved, replied, “Well considering I just warned the last three Goebbels to hurry up and hide I suggest you do the same.”   - Albert Friedlander In the final analysis, who can we depend upon but ourselves?

"The Nazi program was designed not only to kill the jews but to killing the telling of Jews - not just the murder of six million human beings - but destroy the destruction.  The Nazis, in other words, wanted a complete eradication of the Jewish people, nothing less." In Belzec not one photograph of the camp survived. Sobibor- where 250,000 were gassed, not even a single picture. Only one photograph of Treblinka. No pictures of inside the gas chambers... and no one entered ever returned to tell. Those who worked near the stench of fires never looked directly at what was going on. "Yes, we worked at the edge of camp, but we had our eyes on the ground." Claude Lanzmann

“Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them.   I greet my wife, my family, and friends.   I had to obey the rules of war and my flag.   I am ready.”   -last words of Adolf Eichmann If this sounds too familiar -- changing of course the names of the countries and allegiances --perhaps it should be a warning bell.